Herman Cain campaign consultant Gary Robbins, a former assistant to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, said that Cain’s much-discussed 9-9-9 plan — which which would set the corporate tax rate, the individual income tax rate and a new national sales tax all at nine percent — was intended less as a real political solution and more as a conceptual idea:

“You’re trying to go to a system that taxes income once and only once and quits double-taxing savings,” Gary Robbins told POLITICO on Wednesday. “That’s something that can really juice the economy, it’s probably worth 15 percent in growth. … The problem with the big-bang changes like that, the flat tax or the fair tax, is that they are so alien to the current system that it would be a great big shock.”

Though Robbins says the plan would work fiscally and economically, he believes people would never accept such drastic changes. …

“It’s not a plan that I concocted,” Robbins said. “There’s nothing wrong with the plan, it just wouldn’t be the one I picked.”

Robbins completed an in-depth analysis of the 9-9-9 plan last month. Talk of Cain’s plan — and accordingly, scrutiny — has surged alongside its candidate in recent weeks, saturating entire segments of last night’s debate on the economy.